History

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) has been in operation for more than ninety years. We present this timeline of organizational achievements and other highlights during the 20th century. For more detailed accounts of the SSRC's history, explore the related documents and links at right. The SSRC's records are stored in the Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

SSRC: 90 Years of Impact

Early History

1923: Led by American Political Science Association Charles E. Merriam, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) holds its inaugural meeting.

1924: The SSRC begins planning its first committees to study such topics as Interracial Relations, Scientific Aspects of Human Migration, and the Eighteenth Amendment.

1928: The Advisory Committee on Business Research, whose members include New York State Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, is founded, signaling the Council's commitment to research on business practices, ethics, and industry relations.

1935: The SSRC establishes the Washington, DC-based Committee on Social Security. Its research is critical to the creation of the U.S. Social Security system.

1937: The SSRC commissions 13 research memoranda to record and analyze the influence of the Great Depression on American society. Topics include crime, education, the family, internal migration, minorities, religion, consumption, health, and social work.

1945:George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Frank Stanton are founding members of the Committee on Measurement of Opinion, Attitudes, and Consumer Wants, which examines problems of sampling, of biases introduced by interviewers, and of the use of panels of responses in repetitive surveys.

Post-World War II

1947: Robert B. Hall publishes his influential Area Studies: With Special Reference to Their Implications for Research in the Social Sciences, sponsored by the SSRC's Exploratory Committee on World Area Research. It warns of scholarly ignorance about many areas of the world and recommends a sweeping educational initiative. Within two years, committees on Slavic and East European Studies and Southern Asia are established.

1947: The SSRC publishes The Reduction of Intergroup Tensions: A Survey of Research on Problems of Ethnic, Racial, and Religious Group Relations.

1959: The SSRC, with the ACLS, forms committees on Contemporary China, the Near and Middle East, and African Studies.

1961: Responding to breakthroughs in scientific research, the SSRC founds a committee on Genetics and Behavior.

1963: The SSRC establishes the Committee on Sociolinguistics, which brings together specialists in linguistics, sociology, and anthropology to study the interaction of languages and societies. This eventually leads to the creation of the field of sociolinguistics.

1968: To improve scholarly relations with the Soviet Union, SSRC and ACLS jointly form the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). Following the sweeping changes some thirty years later, IREX established itself as an independent organization.

1972: Ping pong diplomacy and the U.S.-China agreement to develop mutually beneficial contacts lead the SSRC, ACLS, and National Academy of Sciences to found the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China, which becomes the leading U.S. structure for educational exchange with the PRC.

1972: As a result of U.S. government interest in addressing social problems that go beyond economic considerations, a social indicators movement emerges, and the SSRC opens a Washington office for its newly created Center for Coordination of Research on Social Indicators. For the next 11 years, the SSRC works with researchers and government agencies to lay a scientific foundation for research on social indicators and to bring this research into the social sciences.

1975: The SSRC launches inquiries into the learning process and giftedness. It recruits leading researchers such as Howard Gardner to help shape this work.

1976: Seeking to expand the study of child development, the SSRC convenes a committee on Social and Affective Development during Childhood.

1983: The Indochina Studies Program begins to lay the groundwork for future scholarly communications with Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The initiative reflects the SSRC's longstanding ability to develop programs in regions that have difficult political relations with the United States. The SSRC would later initiate programs with Cuban and Iranian social scientists. Its programs on Cuba and Vietnam remain active today.

1985: The SSRC founds the Committee on International Peace and Security and extends the concept of security beyond military and technology issues to include nationalism and ethnic conflict, international ethics, the environment, and sustainable development. It also encourages collaboration among anthropologists, psychologists, and physicists.

1988:William Julius Wilson and Marta Tienda are named to the SSRC's newly established Committee on Research on the Urban Underclass, whose seminars attract participants from federal agencies and congressional committees.

1989: The SSRC-Mellon Minority Fellowship Program is announced with the goal of increasing the number of African Americans, Latinos/as, and Native Americans in core fields within the arts and sciences and of diversifying the faculties at colleges and universities.

Post-Cold War

1991: The SSRC establishes the Abe Fellowship Program, and an office in Tokyo, to provide fellowships to U.S. and Japanese researchers to study emerging global issues, problems in advanced industrial societies, and U.S.-Japan relations.

1994: The SSRC forms the Committee on International Migration, which sponsors, among many publications, the award-winning Handbook of International Migration: An American Experience. Our work on migration continues to this day.

1996: The end of the Cold War and the quickening pace of globalization has turned the future of area studies into the number one issue for Council leadership. In March of this year, the SSRC announces the dissolution of the 11 area committees that it has jointly sponsored with the ACLS (in many cases, for over thirty years) and the creation of a new international program with thematic, cross-regional, and cross-cultural components. The goal is to transform the area studies field by integrating it into traditional social science disciplines—especially, economics, sociology, and political science. In subsequent years, the SSRC shifts the emphasis of its programs from country and area to theme and context-sensitivity.

Related Documents

Related Links

Foreword by Craig Calhoun. Afterword by Kenneth Prewitt. Reprinting "Social Science Research Council: The First Fifty Years," by Elbridge Sibley, with Foreword and Afterword by Eleanor Bernert Sheldon.

Scholars wishing to consult the SSRC records at the Rockefeller Archive Center should contact RAC for an appointment:

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About the SSRC

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is an independent, international,
nonproﬁt organization founded in 1923. It fosters innovative research, nurtures new generations of
social scientists, deepens how inquiry is practiced within and across disciplines, and mobilizes necessary
knowledge on important public issues.